Hiring Equipment

by Anna
(Bournemouth)

I'm planning a small wedding reception at my mum’s house using her lounge, conservatory and small garden with a BBQ and buffet. We're arranging for her furniture to go into storage for a few days and need to hire tables, chairs, crockery, cutlery, glasses etc. To seat around 40 people the cheapest price I've managed to find is £500! We really can’t afford to spend so much just on equipment but I also don't want to go down the paper plate route either! Because it is at my mums I want it to look a bit special. Do you have any advice or ideas? Also wedding is 29th August this year so starting to panic!!!!!
Many thanks!!

Answer:

Your small wedding reception sounds lovely, but I definitely think you could get your equipment cheaper than that! I remember when I was looking to hire items for my wedding; I did have to search around quite a bit as the prices vary a lot. Don’t be afraid to use different companies for different things if it’ll get you what you want cheaper, but take into consideration delivery charges and VAT is never normally included – so watch out for it!

Just a couple of things to consider, have you thought about borrowing equipment? You could ask your local town hall, community centre, church hall or sports centre if they would lend you their equipment for a small fee and deposit. You may find that’s much cheaper than hiring from a proper catering hire firm.

You could also ask your neighbours or guests to bring their garden furniture. We ended up having a couple of sets of neighbour’s furniture in the garden at our wedding and it provided 10 additional seats and two large tables. You’ll probably find people will be delighted to help out as well! We certainly did.

With your glass hire, you can get this free from most wine merchants and supermarkets if you buy your wine and other drinks from them. They’ll usually deliver as well, which is handy when you’re rushed off your feet organising everything! They’ll probably also be able to provide you ice buckets and ice too – although I don’t think this was free for us (a clean black dustbin works just as well!).

Don’t bother with table linen, just buy a banqueting roll to cover the tables. If you use two sheets, you can use one to cover the top of the table and the second to cover the front of the table, so it looks like a full length table cloth and hides any nasty table legs. You can buy good quality napkins from any of the supermarkets, or your even local pound shop. Linen is generally expensive and it’s an easy thing to substitute if you want to keep your costs down.

The only thing you can’t substitute is your crockery and cutlery. For this, you’ll have to shop around and get lots of quotes. For all our crockery (including lots of serving dishes ) and cutlery, we spent under £250 for 100 guests. So you should be able to do much better. Don’t forget to get a few extra pieces as well as people will always drop their forks on the floor!

I hope that helps.